PEARSON BRIDGE PTY. LIMITED V. ALONZO

WS THE HIGH COURT OF AUS'

Vv.

ALONZO

REASGES FOR JUBRMERT

Judgment delivered é:

MONDAY

BRIA PTA

Appeal

fon

e

missed

BRIDGE pry LTD

RDER

with costs,

SS.

PEARSON BRIDGE PTY LTD

ALONZO

JUDGMENT - STEPHEN J.

ALONZO

This appeal is noteable for the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence upon which the learned trial judge was obliged to arrive at his decision. The full circumstances of the appeal appear from the reasons for judgment of my brother Aickin.

Argument on the appeal cencentrated upon the view to be taken of the respondent's pre-accident earning capacity. This was said largely to depend upon the' respondent's rate of earnings at the time of the accident, when employed by the appellant for whom he had worked for only seven days when he received his injury.

This may seem a slender foundation upon which to erect an estimate of earning capacity which is to be projected for some twenty years into the future; the more so since the respondent's employment was as a labourer on a civil engineering project of limited duration which provided unusual working conditions and correspondingly unusual terms of remuneration, involving shift work underground on the basis of a six-day working week.

I do not regard his Honour's assessment of economic loss as being to any substantial extent dependent upon the respondent brief period of pre~injury employment with the appellant. However,

since a good deal was made of the point, I state my views concerning

tthe evidence of the respondent's earnings during that period. The learned trial judge said that he accepted the plaintiff's evidence that he earned some $200 clear of tax for the week he worked for

the appellant. It is not clear to me that this is what the respondent intended to convey when he said, through an interpreter, "T got $205-206". However he was not cross-examined on the point and the defendant. led no oral evidence; indeed in a somewhat equivocal exchange between counsel for the defendant, the present appellant, and the learned trial judge the former may have gone so far as to concede the accuracy of the evidence; as with much else iin the evidence, the position is not clear. Some doubt is cast upon that evidence by other circumstances. In the particulars to his statement of claim the respondent asserted a capacity to earn, hefore his injury, only $180 per week, and that without specifying whether before or after tax, but this does not appear to have been adverted to by the parties at the trial. Through a witness called on the respondent's behalf, an experienced local union official who was familiar with the rates of pay and conditions of the respondent's employment, the respondent tendered a schedule of award raies payable locally to builders' labourers such as the respondent; even allowing for the special margins and allowances applicable to employment with the appellant, it nevertheless appears to conflict with the respon- Gent's evidence. However this witness was not questioned about any